A HEART-BREAKING SCENE
“The scene was now terrible. Particularly do I remember a young child with a life-belt around her calling, ‘Mamma!’ She was not saved. I had seen her on the liner, and her sister was on the collapsible boat, but I could not reach her. I saw a cold-storage box or cupboard. I swam towards it and clung to it. This supported me for a long time. At last I saw a boat coming towards me and shouted. I was heard and taken in. From this I was transferred to what I think was a trawler, which also picked up three or four others. Eventually I was placed upon a ferry boat known as the Flying Fish, in which, with others, I was taken to Queenstown.
“It was quite possible that some people went down while in their cabins, because after lunch it was the custom with some to go for a rest. A friend of mine on the liner has told me he saw Alfred G. Vanderbilt on deck with a life-belt and observed him give it to a lady. It seemed to me the seriousness of the situation scarcely was realized when the boat was torpedoed. It was all so sudden and so unexpected, and the recollection of it all is terrible.”
CHAPTER V
THE PLOT AGAINST THE RESCUE SHIPS
[GERMAN SUBMARINES PREVENTED RESCUE OF LUSITANIA PASSENGERS] — [STORY OF ETONIAN’S CAPTAIN] — [DODGED TWO SUBMARINES] — [NARRAGANSETT DRIVEN OFF] — [TORPEDO FIRED AT NARRAGANSETT].
From the lips of Captain Turner, of the Lusitania, and from several of the survivors the world has heard the story of the sudden appearance among the débris and the dead of the sunken liner, of the German submarine that had fired the torpedo which sent almost 1,200 non-combatants, hundreds of them helpless women and children, and among them more than a hundred American citizens, to their deaths. But it remained for the captain of the steamship Etonian, arriving at Boston on May 18, to add the crowning touch to the tragedy.
Captain William F. Wood, of the Etonian, specifically charged that two German submarines deliberately prevented him from going to the rescue of the Lusitania’s passengers after he had received the liner’s wireless S. O. S. call, and when he was but forty miles or so away, and might have rendered great assistance to the hundreds of victims.
Captain Wood charged further that two other ships, both within the same distance of the Lusitania when she sank, were warned off by submarines, and that when the nearest one, the Narragansett, bound for New York, persisted in the attempt to proceed to the rescue of the Lusitania’s passengers, a submarine fired a torpedo at her, which missed the Narragansett by only a few feet.